


By Any Other Name

by Agent_24



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-27 00:41:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20398846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Agent_24/pseuds/Agent_24
Summary: The Traveler can't ever just let things lie.





	By Any Other Name

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tanyart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tanyart/gifts).

> Inspired by tanyart's "pray your soul to keep".

He feels that he is a man, and that he isn’t terribly old, but something seems out of place. He can’t recall his own name. He feels that he ought to be doing something. 

“You’ll have to pick one,” a little drone tells him, blinking at him with a single blue eye. “A name, that is. Your old one is dead.”

“The hell’s that mean?” he asks. 

The drone rotates, clicking patiently. “You’ve been dead a long time,” it says. “I brought you back with the Traveler’s Light. You’re a Guardian now. I’m your Ghost.”

He pauses. He doesn’t know what a Guardian is. “You work for me?”

It clicks again. “We’re partners.”

“Oh,” he says. He looks around. The abundant nature around him looks the same as any other nature must, he supposes, but it feels wrong, too. Overgrown, displaced. “Where is everyone?”

“Everyone you knew is probably dead,” it says. “I’m sorry. Most of humanity lives in The Last City now. Would you like to go there? There’s armor. And food.”

Food. He isn’t hungry right this minute. Maybe he should be. Isn’t he thin for as strong as he feels?

“Sure,” he says, and that’s that.

* * *

Everyone in The Last City calls him ‘Guardian’ for the time being, even his Ghost. It has no name either, and he hears that’s common, but sometimes he passes by Guardians who give their Ghosts names and wonders if it wants one like he wants one. 

The Tower — or, apparently, what’s left of it — is buzzing with other Guardians and weapon vendors and mortal workers. He eats and takes a long look at Tower wares before he choses a bow, a shotgun, and some throwing knives. 

“I think you’re probably a Hunter,” his Ghost tells him. He isn’t quite sure why that matters, but he likes the cloaks, so he agrees. 

The Hunter Vanguard is dead, he’s told, and most seasoned Hunters have fucked off from the Tower to avoid the position. Something about a curse, or a dare, or both, but whatever it is means he’s left without a mentor for now. 

The Tower is suffocating. He gets food and bounties and a ship and leaves for beyond the City walls to get a feel for his Light, and hunt Eliksni. 

He freezes under shockblades. He dies a lot.

* * *

He decides his name is Hiram. 

He doesn’t quite love it. It doesn’t feel just right. He looks in the mirror and thinks he doesn’t really look like a Hiram. 

“You’ll get used to it,” his Ghost promises. “Or you can always change it more than once.”

“I guess,” says Hiram.

He joins a small fireteam of Guardians not much older, a Titan and a Warlock who do their best to explain the different facets of Light to him, but the Titan is a Striker and the Warlock is a Dawnblade. Hiram takes to Void.

Mostly, he doesn’t have a great idea of what he’s doing, but it feels good to feed his team Light when they’re surrounded and starving for it. 

They drag him into the Crucible when he has a better grasp on his abilities. Hiram thinks the Crucible handler is too loud, but he understands the need for this game. He dies quicker by Guardian hands than he does by enemies of humanity.

An Arcstrider kills him eventually. Hiram sees that staff lit bright blue and freezes, and all he feels before his body burns away beneath it is a terrible, paralyzing fear. 

“What’s so bad about Arc deaths?” his Ghost asks. 

Hiram doesn’t know. He’s never liked dying to Arc. He wonders if it has anything to do with the strange scars beneath his ribs, but he can’t recall what caused them. 

“The body remembers, I reckon,” he answers.

* * *

“What’s Gambit?” Hiram asks. 

“Uh,” his Warlock squawks.

“Relax, Tamarin,” says the Titan. “I’ve played. It’s fun.”

“I’ve played too, and those…_ things _ aren’t fun, Cyrus,” Tamarin mutters.

“What is it?” Hiram repeats. 

Cyrus-3 shrugs. “Some guy’s been squatting in the plaza for a while now. Hear he’s moving someplace more official, so I guess the Vanguard's fine with it. You just fight whatever enemies he says and kill a bigass Taken, is all.”

“That’s _ not _all,” Tamrin insists. “There’s motes. Like orbs of Light but...other. And those Taken are hungrier than anything I’ve seen in the field. And you’re racing another fireteam, as if all that wasn’t enough.”

“Sometimes an enemy Guardian comes through a portal to kill us,” Cyrus chips in. “Invaders, they’re called. You die and you lose any motes you pick up. Drifter — that’s the handler — wants ‘em dropped in this thing called a bank.”

Drifter. Doesn’t sound like a proper name. “What for?” Hiram asks.

“Dunno,” Cyrus says. He leans forward and lowers his voice, teasing. “Says it’s gonna make us _ shiver.” _

“He gives me the creeps,” Tamarin announces. She looks at Hiram, then frowns. “Don’t tell me you want to try,” she pleads.

Hiram glances up, fiddling with his knife.

“You two are going to get us killed for real,” Tamarin complains.

* * *

By the time they get a moment to play a match, the plaza squatter has moved.

“That’s a bank,” Cyrus whispers as they go past the gate. “Go on and grab your bounties. Tamarin and I will wait for you in orbit.”

Hiram nods. There’s a line; apparently this rogue Lightbearer is popular. Hiram eyes the bank and tries to figure out what the hell it does. He knows that not long ago, the Cabal had almost captured the Light for themselves, but he doesn’t understand that, either. Maybe this thing was similar?

A sharp bark of laughter catches his attention. There’s only two Guardians in front of him now, minus a Hunter that waits off to the side — one’s an Awoken Warlock with an auto rifle strapped to her back, all dark metal and smooth wood and wrapped leather. She’s smiling, but she’s using sign. It’d been the vendor’s laugh that had caught Hiram’s attention. 

It’d sounded mean. Whatever they’d been discussing had been fit for mockery. 

They exchange a few more words before the Warlock leaves. She slides past Hiram with some easy, unhurried grace, and pays him no mind even as he stares at her weapons. There’s a strange hand cannon on her hip, and it emanates a strange, biting cold as she walks by. 

When Hiram looks back up, the vendor is staring at him. 

There is such an intensity in his blue eyes that for a moment, Hiram feels pinned. Multiple emotions flit over the man’s face: some measure of horror, pity, fury, and Hiram can’t grasp what all that has got to do with him. He’s done his looking by time the Guardian in front of him finishes and still has no answer for it; the guy seems a little thin for a Guardian, even under all those clothes, and his eager smile doesn’t reach is eyes. Beyond that, he seems to get paler by the minute, like he’s getting sick. 

“Call me Drifter,” he tells Hiram.

_ Fake, _Hiram decides, and it sounds like Drifter’s trying not to grit his teeth. 

Drifter doesn’t ask his name, just leaps right into explaining Gambit to him in more detail than Tamarin and Cyrus had. He says it all like a carefully rehearsed script. Hiram is the one getting paid here, but he still feels like Drifter is selling him something.

“He gave me some kinda look,” Hiram tells his fireteam when he goes to meet them.

“He gives everyone some kind of look,” Tamarin mutters.

_ Not that Warlock, _Hiram thinks. “He always shake and jitter like that?”

“Buddy,” Cyrus says, “The sooner you stop trying to make Drifter seem normal, the better.”

* * *

The Gambit match goes a little poorly, if only because Hiram barely has any idea what’s going on. 

It’s also because the Drifter’s voice tugs at him funny. He manages his first large blocker after Tamarin helps him kill a high value target; Drifter laughs that mean laugh over comms, and Hiram almost laughs with him. 

“Guardians can’t remember anything of their past lives,” his Ghost reminds him gently. 

“I know that,” Hiram says, crabby. There is nothing about the Drifter that feels familiar, nothing about _ anything _that ever feels like a memory, but something about that man makes him uneasy, and he can't seem to let it go.

“Maybe the Primeval unnerved you,” his Ghost offers. 

The Primeval felt like cold seeping through clothes. It felt like knowing a long sleep was coming. It felt like starvation, all-consuming 

That’s not it. Hiram answers, “Maybe.”

* * *

Cyrus makes them go back into Gambit later that week. Tamarin complains. Hiram says nothing except for a perhaps too-quick agreement to go. It becomes a regular thing. 

He fetches bounties again. Drifter’s lightless eyes track him from the moment he steps through the gate. 

Maybe if Hiram could remember a damn thing, he could pin down some kind of behavioral pattern here, but all the Guardians he asks are used to the guy by now, with his conman’s grin and his haunted gaze, and so Hiram gets no answers.

“You could ask him,” Cyrus says. 

“Eva Levante says he gets jumpy if you ask him,” Tamarin warns. 

“Bastard’s always jumpy,” Hiram scowls. 

He doesn’t ask him.

* * *

Drifter puts out an offer of triple pay the day after Shaxx offers double, which brings Guardians into the Annex in troves. 

“Let’s try Prime,” Cyrus says while they lounge in Tamarin’s apartment. 

“You’ve got a deathwish,” Tamarin tells him automatically.

None of them have played Prime before. Hiram’s already heard through the grapevine that one of the first fireteams to try it got wiped out, permanent-like. It’s not a game, like Gambit is. 

“I hear Prime’s for keeps,” Hiram says slowly. 

“I know,” Cyrus says, a little sheepish. “I just think...there might be some merit in it all. Y’know, using the Darkness against our enemies.”

“We could die,” Hiram says. “Kinda death where we stay down.” 

“I _ know,_” Cyrus insists. “Listen. I talked to this Warlock —” 

Tamarin shoots him a look. “Which one?” 

“Not important —”

“It’s Jazel,” Tamarin tells Hiram. 

“Still barkin’ up that tree, huh?” Hiram asks, propping his feet on the coffee table. 

“That is irrelevant to my point,” Cyrus says, and if his cheeks weren’t metal, Hiram’s sure he’d be blushing. “Jazel’s been having these dreams, and — you know he’s friends with Ghaul’s killer? Said she’s been seeing shit. Visions and all that. I’m just saying it doesn’t hurt to have options.”

Tamarin goes quiet. Hiram looks at her. She and Cyrus are older than him; both of them lost their Light in the Red War. Hiram doesn’t know that kind of trauma, but...well. Having a second out does sound nice. 

“If these Primevals kill one of us,” Tamarin says, then trails off. 

“With your Well?” Cyrus scoffs, and Tamarin’s dark skin flushes as bright as her hair. “What do you say, Hiram?”

Hiram scoffs too. “If you two think you’re going in there without me, you got another think comin’.”

Cyrus’ mouth lights up bright yellow. “Hell yeah.”

* * *

Drifter stares at him again when he goes for Prime bounties.

Hiram watches Drifter’s hands shake as he accepts payment and delivers another rehearsed set of lines. Hiram gives the same casual replies as always. It’s not quite small talk. Hiram doesn’t really know what it is.

“Be seein’ you, brother,” Hiram says as he leaves. He doesn’t know why; he’s never said that before. Drifter stops short, like it’s some strange thing to hear, like he himself doesn’t say it all the time. 

Prime is a brilliant kind of terrifying. Drifter speaks into his comms, impersonal but urgent, goading, and the Primeval hits harder than anything Hiram has ever faced.

He almost never wants to do it again.

* * *

“I almost wish I had answers for you,” his Ghost says. 

For the umpteenth time since his rebirth, Hiram stands in front of his bedroom mirror and prods at the scar just beneath his ribs. He wishes he knew who he was when he earned that scar. He wishes he knew who gave it to him. 

“You’d be sad if you knew,” his Ghost says. “The Traveler wipes you clean so you won’t mourn.”

Hiram thinks that’s the sort of thing a god should ask about before doing, if it’s so benevolent. Maybe he would like to remember his parents. Maybe he’d had siblings. Maybe he’d had close friends.

“You were very old,” Ghost adds. It’s told him this many times. “Humans haven’t lived so long since the Golden Age. Even if they weren’t killed —”

“Someone I knew was a Guardian,” Hiram interrupts.

His Ghost goes silent. It’s thought of this already. 

“Somebody put this mark on me,” Hiram says, poking at his scar again. It’s a handprint, slightly smaller than his own, and it’s been burned into his skin since he woke up.

“They could still be dead,” Ghost reminds him, careful about it. “The War took many lives. It could be impossible to find them.” It pauses. “Why do you want to? It won’t bring your memory back. You won’t feel anything for them.”

Hiram glances over himself in the mirror again. He stands there bare chested, hair down to his shoulders, and he thinks — _ again _— that he doesn’t look quite like a Hiram. He doesn’t know what he looks like. Dirt-blonde hair, muddy eyes, a scar across his mouth that bites into the scruff on his jaw...he wishes he knew how he’d earned that, too.

He wishes he could explain the handprint. He wishes he recognized his own accent. He wishes he knew what his body remembered. 

“I think the Drifter knows me,” he says, and his Ghost lets out a little sigh.

* * *

Hiram stops just outside the gate and realizes he hasn’t fully thought this whole thing through. 

That’s always kind of been his way of things, not thinking on any problem too far in advance, or only thinking of it briefly if he did. So he has, of course, imagined that this might go poorly, but only in passing, and he hasn’t at all pictured what he should do if it does. 

Cyrus’ hand on his back stops him from backing out. At his side, Tamarin laces their fingers and squeezes. 

“We’ll wait for you in the hall,” Cyrus says.

“There’s nothing wrong with changing your mind,” Tamarin says reassuringly. “And if he doesn’t know you, then...then we’ll help you keep looking, if you want.” 

Another thing he hasn’t thought over: what he’ll do in the aftermath. There’s too many maybes or what-ifs here. Hiram doesn’t know if he wants Drifter to know him. He doesn’t know if he wants to ask for details. Maybe, if nothing comes of this, he’ll let the whole thing go. Maybe he’ll let the whole thing go if something does. 

“Eyes up,” Cyrus says kindly, and gives him a little push. 

Hiram bites his lip as he walks in, dressed in civilian clothes. That lingering Hunter waits in the corner again, and the only other Guardian around is that same Awoken Warlock from before. She leans over the railing at Drifter’s side, their backs to the doorway while they whisper and snicker quietly. The Warlock clams up when she hears Hiram’s footsteps, then straightens and nods in greeting. 

Drifter only glances back at him.

“Mind if we talk?” Hiram asks. 

Drifter pauses too long before he turns to face his guest, a smile plastered on his face. “What kinda talk, friend?” he asks, cheerful as ever. 

“The private kind,” Hiram says, glancing at the Warlock and the Hunter. “If you got a minute.”

“I’m a busy man,” Drifter replies easily. 

“Not right now, you ain’t,” Hiram observes. 

Drifter’s expression darkens. The Warlock’s bright eyes flick to him for a cue. Drifter repeats through his teeth, “What kinda talk?” 

There are three pairs of eyes on Hiram. It feels like thirty. He balls his hands into fists and swallows his nerves, then asks, “Do you know me?” 

Fury flashes across Drifter’s face so quick that Hiram nearly misses it. Those lightless eyes don’t leave him, but Drifter says, “Gimme a minute,” and the Warlock and Hunter leave in opposite directions.

“You have any idea what the hell you’re askin’?” Drifter snaps once they’re gone, crossing his arms over his chest. 

“Tell me you don’t and I’ll go,” Hiram says. “You drill holes in my head every time I come here. Tell me that ain’t ‘cause you recognize me.” 

“It ain’t,” Drifter says stiffly.

“You damn liar,” Hiram says.

“Maybe I think you’re pretty, huh?” Drifter sneers. “Ever think on that?” 

Hiram scoffs. “If there’s a Hunter you fancy, sure the hell ain’t me.” 

Drifter opens his mouth to retort, but Hiram interrupts, “You look like you’re gonna puke every time you see me.” 

“Might be you need a shower.” 

“Might be you know me.” 

“What would you care if I did?” Drifter demands. “You don’t know _ me.” _

“I —” Hiram says, then stops. 

Drifter laughs, sharp and rude about it. “You think you’ve got some kinda ties to me?” he spits, full of venom. “You think just ‘cause the Traveler gave you somebody’s face that you’ve got a right to their old life? You ain’t _ ever _gonna be him.” 

This is said with such a hatred that Hiram nearly flinches. He doesn’t know what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything, and this starts a long and uncomfortable staring contest between them. 

Eventually, Hiram says, “Reckon that’s true.” 

Drifter blinks like he’d expected more of a fight out of him. Maybe if Hiram wasn’t a Risen, he would’ve gotten it. Hiram is absolutely certain now that Drifter knew him in a past life, and he thinks he has a right to know more than that, but not the right to dig it up.

“Be seein’ you,” Hiram says. 

He’s only just made it to the gate when Drifter says, “Judson.” 

Hiram pauses, glances back.

Drifter’s unfolded his arms. Hiram glances down at Drifter’s hands and watches them shake. Drifter balls his fists. He adds quietly, “That was your name. Back then.” 

Hiram turns towards him again while he mulls it over. Judson. _ Judson. _He supposes he could look like a Judson, if he looked like anything. “What was I to you?” he murmurs. 

Drifter’s face twists like he’s wrestling with something. Hiram considers the pinch of his brow, the way his mouth tightens, and wonders if he should be fond of it.

“Me and Judson were friends,” Drifter answers, and Hiram doesn’t miss the way he doesn’t say _ you. _Then, raspier, “Brothers.” 

Every time Drifter has ever called him ‘brother’ over comms seems weightier now. It shouldn’t be.

Hiram lifts his shirt. “You do this to me?”

Drifter inhales, lifts his chin slightly, eyes fixed on Hiram’s scar. 

It’s just enough of an answer. Hiram drops his shirt, chews his lip. He asks, “You kill me?”

Drifter meets his eyes after a missed beat. “I closed a wound.” 

Hiram guesses it hadn’t worked. He wants to ask a question about that. He wants to know what killed him, or who; he wants to know if he suffered long, or if anybody else did; he wants to know if Drifter ever wept for it, or if the wet sheen in his eyes is Hiram’s imagination. He also doesn’t want to know any of those things.

He asks, “Did I know you as Drifter, then?” 

Drifter lets out a huff of air and looks away like it will somehow soften the blow of answering. “Judson called me Germaine,” he mutters. 

And that...is just awful. Hiram says disbelievingly, “That ain’t your name.” 

“No.” 

“Drifter ain’t, neither.” 

“Names’ don’t matter,” Drifter tells him.

Hiram doesn’t know if that’s true or not. He figures it could be. Still, he strides back into the room, more sure than he’s ever been, and raises his arm. “I’m Hiram,” he says. 

There’s a moment of silence. Drifter shakes his hand. He squeezes too tight. 


End file.
